Monday, January 14, 2013

Science and industry update

"Well, shit" edition.

Capital ship prices decided not to come back up after all, and it has become necessary to place a hold on my rorqual blueprints, which have long been the backbone of my manufacturing project. 5 of 9 capital ships are not worth building at this point, accounting for 9 of the 17 hull blueprints I own (to be fair, though, nag and phoenix have been out of production for more than 6 months).

The buildup of hulls sitting in my hangar instead of selling has caused a liquidity pinch, and I haven't been able to replace capital ship component blueprints (which I research and sell) as they come out of resarch.

My plan to deal with this is to start pricing unsold hulls to sell rather than waiting for profits to come back up, and to use the liquidity from that to buy component blueprints to research -- putting the isk back to work for me.

In order to mitigate this problem in the future I intend to have extra capital ship blueprints, so that when one hull isn't profitable I can replace it with one that is. Have to stop revelations? Add moros blueprints. Have to stop nidhoggurs? Add a chimera and an archon. My plan is to finish getting my replacement set to "highly researched" levels, then put my current set in until they're at the same level, and keep both sets.

Project status:

Capital ship manufacturing: This is technically still operating at capacity, but that will cease to be the case over the next few weeks as my nidhoggur, revelation, and rorqual blueprints fall out of production.

Component blueprint research: In progress and making solid profits, though I have about 20 research slots going free. This is being dealt with as noted above.

There are a number of folks who made a bunch of money with the FW Tier 5 LP fiasco and have used that money to get into capital ship manufacturing, seems like there may not have been enough room for all of us. :(

I want wondering what has happened or what has changed to all of a sudden make some of the ships you were producing all of a sudden to not be as profitable?

Is it increased competition or like Anonymous above might have attributed to with new players in the Capital Manufacturing market place? Has something changed in Null Sec to make the demand for some the Capital Ships no longer as much in demand? Do you believe that the publishing of the series of How to Guides for Capital Ship Manufacturing have played some role in the process of attracting new players into the arena as well that may now be affecting your own profits?